When we last checked in on one of many of Donald Trump's feuds, the Club for Growth was having a hard time
finding takers for an ad campaign it was proposing against The Donald. It seems that "some top GOP financiers" were worried that such an effort could "backfire" since every person or thing that got sucked into a Trump fight loses. That's still a concern for many Republicans, but not all, apparently. CfG has managed to scrape together $1 million to
run two ads in Iowa attacking Trump for being a closet liberal: "Which presidential candidate supports higher taxes, national health care and the Wall Street Bailout? It's Donald Trump," one of the ads intones.
The group's political arm is launching a $1 million advertising campaign in Iowa starting later this week, branding Trump "the worst kind of politician." The two advertisements highlight Trump's past statements that he identifies as a Democrat and that he has supported using eminent domain to take private property. Trump, one of the ads says, is "playing us for chumps."
In a small room packed with lights and TV cameras at the National Press Club, Club for Growth President David McIntosh declared: "Donald Trump has the worst [economic] record in the entire field with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders."
"We've tested the ads ... we're confident that most people in Iowa will see these messages," McIntosh said.
They'll see those messages, but will it work? Trump "appears to show no concern about the group's history of defeating moderates and helping to propel the Tea Party in 2010, which saw non-establishment Republicans such as Rand Paul, Ron Johnson and Mike Lee win Senate seats." That's probably because he knows he's tapped into the real zeitgeist of the tea party. It was subsumed by big money organizations like Club for Growth and the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity who saw in it a great ability to astroturf to beat Democrats and promote the policies that their membership—rich Republicans—prioritize, primarily lower taxes for themselves.
The rank-and-file tea party, however, is not that. They're right-wing populists who don't have a problem with big government as long as that government is helping them as opposed to "those" people. The glue that's held them to the Kochs and the CfGs and the billionaires is opposition to a president who is one of "those" people. Now they have a candidate willing to express his—and their—racism out loud. They don't need CfG to speak for them.